INVENTORY SHORTAGE HINDERS HOMEBUYERS

Ashley and Brian Standing have been house hunting for about a year, and they’re a little tired of the hunt.

In the past 12 months, the young San Diego couple have put in 80 to 100 offers on homes in the $500,000 to $750,000 range in areas like Point Loma, Ocean Beach and Bay Park. They admit some of their offers have been lowballs, but they learned quickly that those wouldn’t work. At times, they’ve tried bidding $20,000 to $30,000 above the asking price but still nothing.

“It’s been insane,” Brian said. “When we first got into the market, there was still more inventory. I don’t know if at the beginning we were more picky as far as putting in offers. But over the last nine months, we’ve been operating as not-as picky.”

Brian Standing is right. He can’t be superpicky because of a serious shortage of homes on the market in San Diego County.

The low inventory has left homebuyers submitting multiple bids and upbidding each other, pushing up prices and putting a damper on the idea of finding a deal on their dream property, experts say.

But for some sellers, the market seems just fine.

Ask Ellen Pansky, a Los Angeles attorney who just sold her condo in University City. After two weeks, she got two offers. Two more weeks later, her deal was closed with a buyer who gave her full price.

“My perception of the market was that it was still down,” said Pansky, who bought the condo for her daughter who was in college then. “I was a little surprised. My expectations weren’t that high about whether I would get a buyer for a full-price offer.”

This has become the new normal for the San Diego County housing market for roughly the past year, a time marked by frustrated buyers, pleased sellers of a certain price range and a lower-than-normal housing stock.

Contradictory outlooks

Roughly 5,300 homes are on the market in San Diego County at this moment, half of what we saw just a year ago. That’s the lowest number in at least 3½ years, says the San Diego Association of Realtors. Inventory has dropped for 15 straight months.

But is this the type of dynamic the county needs to finally see a fully recovered real estate market?

“It’s not a situation where the demand is overwhelmingly strong,” said Michael Lea, professor at SDSU’s Corky McMillin Center for Real Estate. “We still have a housing market that is not well. There are few houses on the market. That’s what’s unusual. It’s stemming from the fact that housing prices are up but are still way off their peaks and there’s negative equity.”

Bill Davidson, a San Diego County homebuilder for 30-plus years, is happy with the status quo. Builders like him have slowly ramped up residential construction since the recession, and have been releasing inventory into the market to feed the pent-up demand.

“It’s just comfortable,” said Davidson, who is planning to develop 64 home lots in La Costa. “It’s a healthy market for buyers and the builder as the economy improves.